Lower Than Angels

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 10.04.2015

Scripture Lesson:  Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12

Listen to Sermon Audio Here:

I spend a whole bunch of time in the library, which after forty years remains one of my favorite places in the whole world.  I remember getting my first library card, remember the impossible magic of a place where you could have all the books you want.  Here, a place full of stories, filled with the sweet smell of books, row upon row of brightly colored spines, casting out their tales like filter-feeding coral, enticing you into the amazing, unexpected worlds living on the pages within.

I still love that magic, and it seems even more magical now in this era of algorithm driven encounter.  As the web grows more and more intelligent, it knows what I want to see.  It learns my interests, learns what I know so that it can market me the things it hopes I’ll buy, like I’m a trout and it’s a Smithwick Rattling Rogue, the perfect lure.  But I’m less frequently surprised, less frequently brought into encounter with the unexpected, less likely to have an unanticipated thing strike my eye.

So I still drift among the bookshelves, as I did the other day, noodling aimlessly from title to title until something unexpected catches my attention.  I was in the self-help books, somewhere after a row of construction-site-yellow books with names like “I-Pad Mini for Dummies,” when a book hooked me.  

Just all of a sudden, there it was, bright-orange and eyecatching, a megabestselling book written by one of those health and wealth authors.  “Harmonic Wealth: The Secret to Attracting the Life You Want,” the title proclaimed, with a tiny little action-figure sized picture of the author beneath it.  I slid it from its place, and there was the author, beaming out larger and healthily and wealthily from the cover.

James Arthur Ray, his name was, and it sounded faintly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.  Surely this wasn’t the guy who shot Martin Luther King, Jr.  No, no, that was James Earl Ray, and I doubt that any self-help bookshelf would have anything he’d written.

I couldn’t resist, and delved into the book, settling into a chair in the reading room.  It was all about how amazingly powerful we are, about how the only reason we don’t have the life we want is because we don’t want it.

The author proudly announced that he had trouble with the word self-help, because really, we don’t need self-help.  We are amazing, magical, powerful, and divine, and the only thing standing between us and getting exactly what we want is that we don’t recognize our own power.

That power comes from quantum something-or-other, because interconnection spooky action something parallel universes something.  Having written on that subject myself, I kept reading.  As it turns out, we only suffer because that’s what we want!  We only don’t have things because our energy doesn’t flow in the right direction.

You see, that’s the problem with those Syrian refugees, really.  I mean, if they just really *wanted* not to be driven from their homes...boom!  Wow. Problem solved!

Which, as I learned, is apparently the direction of figuring out how to make lots and lots of money.  You can have all the money and power you want, always, no matter what, because we are basically gods, so long as we let our Godness get what it wants.  If we don’t, it’s our own fault.  “Being poor is a sin,” Ray proclaims.

“You must be master of Earth and heaven to become the spiritual being you were born to be,” the book announces.

That kind of power is the goal, we are told.  It’s the dream of our culture, of the capacity to be just a little lower than angels, of having amazing power and control over all that we survey.

It’s also, quite frankly, one of the things I struggle with most as I read through this portion of the letter to the Hebrews.    

Hebrews was written late in the Apostolic era, and we honestly have no clue who actually wrote it.  For a while in the early church, there were some who thought it had been written by Paul.  But the text itself does not claim that, and the theology and writing style make it unlikely that Paul wrote it.   Martin Luther argued that it was probably Apollos, a prominent early Christian from Alexandria who is mentioned in both Paul’s letters and the Book of Acts.  

I honestly really buy into Luther’s perspective.  The letter of Hebrews itself is so uncompromisingly High Church, soaring, complicated, and rich in ritual.  The language, structure, and tone of the letter indicates a writer of unusual refinement and sophistication.  And Alexandria was a center of learning, the heart of teaching, and the home of the greatest library in the ancient world.  So, sure, as someone who still loves libraries, I totally buy into Luther’s argument.

Hebrews itself is less a letter than a theological treatise.  Although it concludes with reference to a visit by the writer, the beginning of Hebrews starts with the phrase “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in may and various ways by the prophets,” which tends to be a lousy way to start an email.

The purpose of Hebrews as a theological essay is relatively straightforward.  It’s a sustained exploration of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, seen through the lenses of the Hebrew priesthood.

And in the midst of all of that, there’s this peculiar section in the text, a section that might resonate with folks who believe that the world is ours for the taking.   “But someone has testified somewhere,” it begins, a footnote that probably wouldn’t cut it with most professors.  It’s a coy quote, a “you and I both know this is Psalm 8:4-6” citation.

And what it seems to offer up is a high anthropology, one unusual in the Hebrew scriptures.  Here, human beings are presented as powerful, not quite angels...or, as the word translated as angels is “Elohim” in Psalm 8, it is perhaps better read as “just a little lower than God.”

Which sounds pretty amazingly close to what our Harmonic Wealth guru was saying, at least until you look at the context of the rest of Hebrews.

That context presses completely human Jesus was, how deeply connected he was not to power and wealth, but to the struggles and losses of humankind.   He was, or so we hear in Hebrews 2:17-18, “..like his brothers and sisters in every respect..” and...and here’s the difference “..tested by what he suffered.”

It is in that connection, in the depth of awareness of both God’s grace and human weakness, that is most significant for the author of Hebrews.   In Jesus, we encounter the intent and purpose and power of our Creator, but God also encounters us.   In Christ, we experience the depth of God’s relationship to us, participation in us, and love for us.

The depth of that form of connection can be hard to process, particularly in a culture that struggles with the idea of sacrifice.  Our society thrives on the cult of self, and where we encounter connection, we want it to serve us.  In our relationships, we are taught to yearn for power over others.  We interact to network, to create a latticework of connections that serves our advancement.   When all we’re taught to chase is self-interest, power and profit, sacrifice can seem an odd thing.   The radical compassion that was required to give over an entire life to teaching compassion to others does not process.  It certainly didn’t process for Ray.

We’d rather have attainment, turning our eyes to our own will to wealth and power, a cultural focus driven into us by the endless and insatiable hungers of consumerism.  We’d rather set our eyes on that prize of wealth and health, driving ourselves towards that goal of getting exactly what we want.

But it seems madness, crazy, because anyone who isn’t utterly self-deluded knows that striving does not alway get you what you want.  It doesn’t hurt, but neither does it guarantee that you will not fail. We are mortals, and we are flawed, and the system to which we are connected does not revolve around us.  We might think we know what our future brings, but we don’t, not with certainty.

I wondered, as I read Hebrews and James Arthur Ray, what happened to this soul, so sure of himself, fabulously rich from a self-help bestseller, famous and successful and actualizing his best future.

I asked the great and powerful Google, and it told me.  There it was, right in the blurb under a picture that looked a whole bunch less wealthy and harmonic.  James Arthur Ray, it said, is a motivational speaker and author who...was...convicted of felony negligent homicide.  The picture was a mugshot.

Now I remembered.  He had been charging ten grand a pop for people to join him in a mystic wealth-and-power sweat lodge designed to maximize their self-somethingorother.  But they remained in a poorly designed and superheated lodge too long, and 19 were hospitalized.  Three died.  After the dust cleared, James Arthur Ray spent two years in the Arizona State Penitentiary.  

Evidently, my cynical self said, this was the life he wanted to attract.

That, that is the core hubris of imagining that our connection to God’s creation revolves around us.  Are we connected?  We are.  But that connection isn’t founded in our own search for power, in our own strength building upon strength.

That connection has its reality in love, in an awareness that our connection is a place of compassion, not a place where power and ego rule.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.